Peter Davison Books

This is a wonderful book. The technique of editing Tchaikovsky's actual and voluminous correspondence into one coherent stream makes for fascinating and tasty reading. Tchaikovsky's intelligence is made obvious, as is his exquisite sensitivity, keen perception, expressivity, and personal charm. I was reading a standard biography at the same time I was reading this, and the comparison did not flatter the standard format. There is no substitute for the "real deal". We are lucky to have this first person record of his "in the moment" thoughts. It is sad that letter writing is a dead practice because it disciplines the writer's mind and reveals much to the lucky reader. This book has given me extraordinary pleasure.

These autobiographical essays describe two worlds, two different times and parts of Jacobson's life. The first is his early years growing up in Kimberly , South Africa. The second are the first years of his life in London. The first set of essays are rich in characters, family, neighbors, school- acquaintances, teachers. I found particularly striking Jacobson's story of an incident where he was treated cruelly by a teacher and the 'bulls' of his class. In this incident Jacobson gives a riveting description of the effect of such intimidation on the soul of the boycotted child. In another powerful essay he writes of an immigrant Jewish South African who unusually takes an Afrikaaner( as opposed to 'English') identity and who later upon sensing with the Cuban invasion of Angola that the Communists are about to destroy his Afrikaaner world , takes his own life.
After South Africa Jacobson finds London to be a spacious land of incredible variety and liberation. He describes here key encounters, including one with the famed critic F.R. Leavis, and tells us how an incidental meeting leads to a dramatic change in his life, his meeting with his future wife.
In the last chapters of the book he focuses on his uncle's and his father's last years. He also writes on a spell of his own as a patient.
There is a sense , an underlying tone of gloom in these pages. But Jacobson is a serious, strong, insightful writer whose work is well- worth reading.

farley mowat is special, no doubt about it: a wonderful way with words, just weaves them together, and his subjects are fascinating, intense, powerful, often quite humorous, and his looks into the human and natural world are worth sharing. if you like farley mowat, and have read anything by him before, or even not, this is a good sample selection of a great and multi-talented writer.

he's realy got an amazing way of turning a phrase. if you are at all interested in the Spanish Civil War this book is a great introduction.

Homage to Catalonia This book is a great read for anyone out there who likes to read. I normally don't read nonfiction books but this one kept my interest throughout the entire book. Orwell describes things in a way that kept my attention the entire time. He even added some selected humour throughout which seemed to lighten the mood. Overall this is a great book that's worth every penny. I'd say go and read it right now if you're looking for a great read.

This is one of the most complete and well-thought-out reports of the Spanish Civil War written in the English language. Considering the importance of international fighters in the war (debatable, but certainly in a political sense, noteworthy), and the effect of the war on socialist myth in the latter half of the 20th century, it is a book not to be missed by anyone interested in either World War II, modern socialism, communism, and/or anarchy, Spain, or George Orwell.

The personal narrative was wonderful and typically vivid Orwell. His complaints about the politics going on behind the scenes, however, were sometimes dull. He admits (repeatedly) that he is biased and perhaps does not know all of what is going on. However, after reading _The Battle for Spain_, I got the sense that his complaining was actually very revealing from an historical perspective.

I read _Homage to Catalonia_ and then _The Battle for Spain_ to get a basic idea about the Spanish Civil War, which I had previously known mainly through punk-rock songs and revolutionary anthem anthologies. I wish I had read them the other way around, though. Although I think this book is indispensable for English-speaking people to understand the Spanish Civil War, it is also a narrow view and very biased (as most works on the subject are). If it were anyone else, my expectations would be lower and I would probably have given it five stars. But compared to other Orwell works (including _Down and Out_) I would give it four.

"Homage to Catalonia" has long passed from the shelf for current events to the shelf of primary historical sources. No one can study the Spanish Civil War without encountering it. On that basis, it's a five-star book; all primary sources should get five stars. As a reading experience, it's not without weaknesses, which the earlier review by H. Schneider examines cogently. I refer you to that review.

Today's newspapers (7-11-08) carried extended obituaries for David Smith, who died in Berkeley, CA, at age 95. Mr. Smith was one of the only 30-some veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the volunteer contingent of Americans who joined the republican cause in Spain to stop fascism before World War II. The defeat of the republican forces, due at least partly to their own turmoils as described by Orwell, allowed the dictator Franco to suppress the 20th Century in Spain until his welcome death in 1975. David Smith was wounded in Spain in 1938. He returned to America, settled in New York, and married Sophie Kaplan, a marriage that lasted 59 years. Smith worked as a machinist, a union organizer, and for 18 years as a public school biology teacher in New Rochelle, where he campaigned for school integration.
David Smith and his wife were active Communist Party members in the 1940s and 1950s, but left the party in disillusionment in the early 1960s. He was one of the victims of blacklisting in the McCarthy era. He retired to Vermont in 1977, and then to California two decades later. During his long retirement, Smith was a dedicated campaigner for peace, a familiar personage at anti-war demonstrations, and an active raiser of relief funds for Central American countries hit by civil strife.

I knew David Smith reasonably well. He was a man of sincerity and integrity; I doubt that he ever did anything in his life that failed to meet his standards of conscientious humanity. He meant to do well, and he did what he believed was right. His support for the welfare of working people and for oppressed people everywhere was unwavering. He had no lust for power or fame. Like several other grass-root American Communists I've known, he was above all a decent guy. That he was naive about Stalinist Russia is clear; that he wasn't always right about his positions seems clear also, but who is? But to portray such a person as a menace to free society, an unscrupulous plotter, a pawn in the game of Kremlin masterminds is libel and foolishness, and a self-deception honorable people in America cannot afford.

After re-reading Catalonia, some 20 years after my first encounter, I am disappointed. I do not think that this is Orwell's best work. It has many of his strengths, mainly the elegant, efficient and straightforward prose that he developed so impressively, but there are some flaws. Main flaw in my view is the fact that the main political theme has become dead and irrelevant. Stalin died some decades ago, the Soviet Empire collapsed, we don't need to dig in the little details of their abominable strategies any longer. Of course we can't blame Orwell for the fact that his concerns are not ours any more. But it shows that the book was not timeless in the sense of surviving its immediate subject, as his other non-fiction did.
Second main weakness of the book: the narration of the Barcelona street fighting and the attempts at understanding them are rather boring.
On the strong side: the tales from the Aragon front are much more interesting. Orwell saw less fighting than he was keen to experience, but he describes the trench routine with the same livelyness that he brought to Wigan coalmines and Paris restaurants previously.
He did see enough fighting to get dangerously injured. People said to him that few men survive a shot through the neck, so he was lucky. He thinks he would have been luckier if he had not been shot at all.
Orwell published the book a few months after his adventure, and before the Spanish Civil War was over. Surprisingly the book was a commercial failure then, and equally surprisingly it has later been named as one of the best non-fiction books of the century.
Why was it ignored in the early time? Possibly because he told the world things that the world didn't want to know. He busted the myth that there was a confrontation of the good and the bad in Spain, that democracy fought fashism. Orwell shows us that there were at least 3 camps, not 2. The most vicious fighting that he experienced was among the 'good guys'. The government side was influenced strongly by the communist party who had secured the support from Russia. Since no other country provided weapons to the government side, that secured a lot of mileage.
Orwell was a hopeless romantic, who loved the feeling of working class rule that he got when he first arrived in Barcelona. That must be the reason for the otherwise incomprehensible book title. That basically socialist attitude must also have put quite a few potential readers off at the time of publication.
Orwell later saw the few months in Spain as his political training period. It put him off communism and Stalin for good, but confirmed his socialist attitude, which however never found a political home in a party, though he did support Labor in his remaining years, from the outside.

4 1/2 stars, really, but we can't do that. This is the original 1855 version. Whitman added to the collection throughout his life, ending up with an overstuffed and very uneven "deathbed" version, which is better known. There are some good poems in it which aren't in the original, such as When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd, but there's a lot of pretty weak stuff, too. The 1855 has a small number of pretty consistently excellent poems which are highly original and loosely but definitely connected. Reading it is a very different experience from wading through the bloated, inconsistent final version - there's something Whitmanesque (i.e., at it's best) about the original collection as a unit. Malcolm Cowley's introduction is also a bit wild and wooly (written in the late 60s or early 70s), but interesting and enlightening.

At least as available for the Kindle, this is not the 1855 edition. It seems to be the final edition, which is of course great, but not what I intended to get based on the product description posted. Also, the foreward and afterward mentioned in the description are missing. I don't expect the moon for a low price, but I do expect to get what I pay for.

Choosing the fullest, most complete version of Whitman's text, before the final editing of the deathbed edition, but following the additions made after the Civil War, the Norton Critical is a must have for students of poetry, or literature, and of nature. The wild, ecstatic hunger for the world, the ravishment of the senses, as Norman Mailer put it (though not about Whitman), the mysticism of the flesh, Whitman is, arguably, the most accomplished poet of American letters.

A must read for poets, students, and pagans (Whitman as spirit of the Green Man himself!).

I bought this and returned it. There must be someone out there with the right voice and reading skills to bring us Whitman's words and rhythms. Ms. Gibson's soprano sing-song doesn't make it.

There seems to be some confusion, both in the editorial reviews and the customer reviews, about what edition is being referred to in this listing. the first editorial review correctly discusses the first edition as shorter and "less bloated" than the deathbed edition. however, the rest of the reviews seem to discuss either edition indiscriminately.

the two are effectively different books. the cover shown is of the first edition including an illuminating essay by malcolm cowley--that's certainly the edition I prefer, and I hope thats what you would get if you ordered this.

Most people know George Orwell by two of his later works - 1984 and ANIMAL FARM. What they don't necessarily know is that, in addition to the thousands of pages of reportage, journalism and essays he also produced in his all-too-brief career, he also penned six other books, including four novels and an autobiographical study of poverty (DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON) which reads better than 90% of the novels ever written. Nevertheless, Orwell is not really thought of as a novelist, but rather as a fiery political thinker who occasionally used fiction to make his points.

COMING UP FOR AIR is as good an argument for Orwell as a novelist as can be made without referencing his masterwork, 1984. Written during the "gathering storm" period of the mid-late 1930s, it reflects not only Orwell's anxiety, dread and disgust in regards to where the world was heading, but captures as well a keen sense of nostalgia for the world as it was during his own childhood - a world without secret police, bombing planes or political fanaticism. A world where it was still possible to believe that everything turned out all right in the end.

COMING UP FOR AIR is the self-told story of George "Fatty" Bowling, a wholly ordinary, lower middle-class salesman who lives in the "inner-outer" suburbs of London. Bowling is "full figured" (meaning fat), wears false teeth, has a nagging wife and two annoying kids, and lives in a generic rowhouse he'll never pay off. He's vulgar, cynical and tactless, but just perceptive enough to be capable of epiphany. One day, wandering down a London street, he's reminded of something from his childhood at the beginning of the 20th century, which he spent in a little farming town called Lower Binfield. Suddenly overcome with nostalgia, a feeling that the world around him is soon going to be smashed to pieces by war and political upheaval, and finally by the fact that his family is suffocating him, George decides to fake a business trip and spend a week in the placid countryside where he grew up - in essence, to crawl back into the womb. But what will the womb look like after the passage of twenty-odd years? Will it still provide comfort, or just reinforce his feelings that the world is not only changing out of recognition, but for the worse?

Like all Orwell's novels, COMING UP FOR AIR is at heart a political book, at once an attack on modern society and a warning that nostalgia for the past won't bring it back.
Masquerading as a "you can't go home again" sermon, the novel is actually about the brutal contrast between the modern world in which Bailey lives (which he hates), and the more pastoral, innocent time of his youth. Although Bailey repeatedly points out the harshness of life in rural England in those sleepy years before WWI, the feeling he himself returns to over and over again is a kind of clear-eyed sentimentality, an understanding that while conditions were physically tougher, people were actually much more secure mentally and emotionally, because the world they lived in was stable and not haunted by fear - of governmental tyranny, and of a greed-crazed corporate Kultur that would systematically disenfranchise and ruin independent business owners. Orwell shows impressive, perhaps even masterly skill at recreating the atmosphere of rural England in 1905, which in Bailey's mind is always summer - insects humming, a golden haze hanging over the fields, fish jumping in the farmer's ponds. The distinction between it and modern London, where everything is cold, chromed-over and streamlined, "even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you" is startling, and shows that Orwell, so often viewed as a mean-spirited misanthrope in public-spirited clothing, was capable of a very human longing for simpler times.

A fat middle-aged salesman goes back to his childhood home to fend off a rising anxiety in prewar Europe, and the result is tragicomedy.

One of the best novels I have ever read. Orwell was never better at creating a mood, an atmosphere, a state of mind, than in this book. It is engaging, witty, and powerful. I'm not sure I can say exactly what point Orwell (as opposed to the protagonist) was trying to make in this book, but I find a lot of resonance between his concerns in 1938 with a coming war and mine today. Not just a concern with a war, but a fear of the permanent, sweeping changes that war will bring with it.

Combine this with "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" and "Down and Out in Paris and London" and you get a very good look into Orwell's mind, and you can see the architecture behind his better-known books, "1984" and "Animal Farm." But both of those books, however great they are in their own way, are both curiously cold and impersonal. Here, we have Orwell at his warmest and most human.

If things made any sense, this is the kind of book that every teenager would read, the way they read (or at least used to read) Vonnegut and Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger.

Great book! A must read! The ending is fantastic, Orwell really involves the reader with this one. Starts off a little slow. This book comes in waves. Another great one!

Oddly, the pocket book cover quotes the NYT that this book is a 'charming ... minor masterpiece'. It took me a while to realize that this is exactly the case.
The novel is set in London in 1938, with WW2 looming. It was Orwell's first novel after risking his life in Catalonia. It was his last novel before Animal Farm. He still had ambitions to play in James Joyce's league as a novelist. He greatly admired Ulysses. In a way, his George Fatty Bowling is Orwell's Leo Bloom in London. But not quite. As charming as the novel is, it is also the final proof that Orwell was not the great novelist that he would have wished to be. He was a great essayist. Even his two later masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984, essentially demonstrate that he was in first place an essayist and a man with a message.
Coming up for Air is the monologue of a middle aged middle class man who takes a break from his oppressive family and job life. He is the antisocial character who paints his front door green, where all others are blue. He escapes for an outing and 'comes up for air'.
The story is told by the hero in an odd mixture of stream of consciousness and autobiography. One might say, Orwell told parts of his own life story. And that is the crux of the matter: he remains the intellectual who sympathizes with the proles and despises the upward ambitions of the lower middle classes.
The book is a failure insofar as Orwell never manages to let Bowling speak. Bowling is just a pretext for Orwell's own words.
The book is not a failure, because what Orwell has to tell us of England between 1893 and 1938 is well worth knowing. Bowling should be an uninteresting man, by all criteria, but Orwell fails to let him bore us.

This obscure novel is vintage Orwell. The candor, the honesty, the confrontation of unpleasant facts dead on...all his signature traits are deployed. He develops such a rapport with the reader, a rapport that transcends time, place, etc., that one begins to think that Orwell is a dear old friend sitting next to you, and speaking in your ear.

This portrait of suburban anomie predates the countless similarly-themed, lesser works inflicted on the public by countless third-raters subsequent to World War II. Orwell is no third-rater...he clocked the mise-en-scene, and laid bare the ennui, meaninglessness, and alienation, with excellent prose, and beautiful metaphors.

I don't think this book is as well-honed as Burmese Days, but it is a memorable achievement all the same. If you are a fan of Orwell's style, this will go down like fine wine...and the aftertaste will be pleasant and lingering

I found the book to be very helpful if a little too detailed. My only real complaint is that some of the French humor doesn't translate well into English, leading to some distracting prose.

This book has to be the most complete single book on sailing. Among the topics covered are sailboarding, fiberglass repair, and catamaran trim. The book does have a European bias, however, so the sections on weather and buoyage aren't as useful for an American audience as, say, those in the Annapolis book. It also has quirky sidebars, like how to make a collapsing log. It's an invaluable reference and a good read.

The Glenans school has been teaching sailing since WWII, and the wealth of practical experience they have shows in this book. This is the best single volume on sailing that I have seen; it combines clear explanations of the physics behind sailing with a vast amount of hands-on knowledge.

For American readers, I will point out two caveats: firstly, in the chapter on meteorology, the book spends a fair amount of time discussing Mediterranean weather. Secondly, when discussing bouyage, the book uses the European system, which is different than the American one (the difference is explained in a sidebar.)

I highly recommend this book to any sailor.

this book is the best concise operating room anesthesia reference available.
anything bigger would be too large, it is not designed to teach but more to remind.

Anyone involved in anesthesia generally recognizes the Mass Gen. as the best pocket reference out there. This new edition is no different. When you need something fast b/c it has slipped your mind, this is the 'goto' book.

I highly recommend it to all MD/DOs, CRNAs & SRNAs.

Robert Frost came into public view with "A Boy's Will" and "North of Boston," his first short collections of poetry. While Frost's "voice" is a bit unformed in these poems, the rich ponderings of nature and love are never stronger, full of "sun-saturated meadows," melancholy looks at life and death, and pearly streams.

"I should not be withheld but that some day/Into their vastness I should steal away," Frost announces in the first poem of "A Boy's Will." He follows up this statement with everything from eerie story-poems ("Love and a Question") to exultant ("A Prayer in Spring") to melancholy meditations on nature's beauty, love, and broken hearts.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," is the first line of one of Frost's more typical poems in "North of Boston," a nuanced work about neighbors rebuilding a wall between them. But then there are poems like "Death of the Hired Man," a long conversation between a man and his wife, about a former worker who has returned home to die. Another is just about a mountain, as told by a farmhand.

Poets take awhile to reach their peak, and Frost was still starting out in these books. That said, it's astounding how good he was even in his first volume of poetry (though at times the rhymes are a little too simple, and the subjects don't vary much). Most striking is Frost's passion -- his enthusiasm, sorrow and thoughts seem to spill off the page.

"A Boy's Will" and "North of Boston" are pretty different, though. The first collection is far less grounded, more ethereal and almost dreamy. Both possess Frost's exquisite phrasing ("A bead of silver water more or less/Strung on your hair won't hurt your summer looks") but the second focuses on more mundane things like hotels, farms and strangers. And more of the poems are long conversations, instead of meditations on nature and life. The first, however, has a poem about a moonlit search for a brook, the God Pan, and the stirring historical poem "In Equal Sacrifice," about Douglas carrying Robert the Bruce's heart to the Holy Land

On an emotional level, the poems are about equal -- "A Boy's Will" is beautifully written, while "North of Boston" is powerful. Some readers might not be thrilled about the conversational poems, which are mostly composed of two people talking in a rather grounded fashion. ("Stark?" he inquired. "No matter for the proof."/"Yes, Stark. And you?"/"I'm Stark." He drew his passport.) But it is quite intriguing to see Frost expanding his poetry and seeing what else he was capable of doing.

"A Boy's Will and North of Boston" encompasses the first two volumes of Robert Frost's classic poetry, and give a look at a poet expanding his talents and finding his unique voice.

The first half, "A Boy's Will," was better than the second, "North of Boston." ABW are romantic poems, about nature, love, and death, in the grand tradition of Wordsworth et al. They ostensibly follow the couse of a boy's life/coming of age.

The second half, or second book, I didn't like much. Most of the poems are hardly poems at all; they're more like short stories written with line breaks. Some of the stories/poems were interesting, some I just couldn't care about. There were a few more "poemy" poems, like Mending Wall and After Apple Picking, but they're the same poems you find in anthologies, so nothing much gained here.

I would guess that Frost published better books than these later in his career.

Many budget-priced classics are poorly edited, with a forward or introduction that is little more than a token gesture. This edition of Frost's early work, comprising his first two publications, is a notable exception. The introduction by William Pritchard and the afterword by Peter Davison are both first-rate. The poems themselves are very fine and if you read them in sequence they give a real sense of the poet's development. It is also nice that they are in their original forms, including the glosses that Frost later removed.

With such fine editing, and at such a low price, this book is well worth having.

The book is a collection of poems by Robert Frost. It combines the collections of A Boys Will, and North of Boston. Many of the poems were about nature, and love. I selected the book because I had read Robert Frost before and I liked his style, and I felt I could relate to some of the poems. Most of them had no riming scheme, and were written in sentences, or stanzas. There was one poem about Blueberries that I particularly enjoyed because I like picking them. I also liked it because some of the poems seemed to have a hidden meaning. I thought that Frost wrote discriptive ad imaginable language. I would recommend it to readers that are older than 13. I would also recommend it to readers who like reading about nature. And finally I would recommend it to anyone who has read Robert frost, and enjoyed his work.

This is a wonderful book which is complete with just about everything you could ask about Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor. The reason it got 4 stars instead of 5? No photos. To be truly complete it needed photos of the Doctor himself and also of his companions.

Nevertheless, this is a fantastic book which is well worth buying if you can get your hands on one. Add it to your collection.

A really interesting book with some great information. The main problem is the writers begin to think that their 'opinion' of the show really matters. The factual stuff is great but when their opinion of some of the seasons begins to cloud the judgement of some of these facts it becomes a problem- example being their description of why some seasons rated beter than others. Despite this it is better than a lot of DW related stuff. Long live the 5th Doctor!

When the hugely popular Tom Baker announced that he was leaving the role and show "Doctor Who", the producers of that show knew that they had a big problem. Both Baker's long tenure and strong personality had resulted in most fans thinking of him as the only Doctor, rather than the 4th. The producers, taking a rather risky move, decided to cast an actor that was the exact opposite of Baker's interpretation. Years later, many are still debating whether or not this was a good idea.

The "Handbook" series provide a detailed behind the scenes view of the Doctor Who show, including many insights into the development of the characters, and the difficulties faced. My favorite section is the scene by scene disectiion of an episode by the show's creative team.

A must for the serious Who fan.